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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28404444">Wraith</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcat512/pseuds/redmadiganX'>redmadiganX (redcat512)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Parahumans Series - Wildbow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Alternate Universe, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 16:35:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,394</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28404444</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcat512/pseuds/redmadiganX</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I woke up from the locker with the power of invisibility. If only I’d had that before, how much better would have school been after the bullying started? But I guess that’s not how the stories all go, because you only get what you want too late.</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>42</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A long, long time ago, Emma and I used to talk about what we’d do if we got super powers.</p><p>What powers we’d want, who we’d tell, what sort of heroes we’d be.</p><p>After Emma turned against me, I’d held on to the idea of getting super powers as a way of getting out of the prison that was my life.</p><p>My wish had been granted, but like so many of the classical stories my mother had read to me, my wish was twisted, and now I had nothing. No friends, no family, and, despite technically having a super power, no power at all.</p><p>I suppose I’d better explain hadn’t I?</p><p>Well. Where to start? The locker, I suppose.</p><p>I passed out in that locker, whether from physical or mental shock – I don’t know.</p><p>I woke up a cape. Or, well, given I haven’t actually done anything much with my powers yet, a parahuman.</p><p>You’re probably wondering what my super power is.</p><p>Now this one’s for the irony. If she’d read it in a book, a story about someone else, my mom would have loved it.</p><p>I woke up with the power of invisibility. If only I’d had that before, how much better would have school been after the bullying started? But I guess that’s not how the stories all go, because you only get what you want too late.</p><p>So now no one can see me, and no one can hear me. It actually would still make for a really great superpower for reconnaissance, oh, but you know what?</p><p>I don’t have any control over it.</p><p>I can’t just turn it on and off, I can’t use it to hide when I need to – no, I’m just invisible all the time. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, I vanished one day and that was the end of that.</p><p>I might as well be dead. Barely anyone noticed or cared, which doesn’t even surprise me.</p><p>For a while after I got powers, the section of corridor with my locker was marked off by police tape. Even in Winlsow, I suppose, a scene that disgusting warranted some attention. Oh, and I suppose the missing student might have gotten a mention.</p><p>But a week passed and life went back to normal. The police tape was removed, the locker replaced, the floor cleaned.</p><p>Life goes on.</p><p>You might be wondering: why am I back at school, the place that felt like a daily prison, the place I have to see every person I’ve ever personally hated?</p><p>Well, for a while I went back home. It’s not like my presence or absence at school would matter for attendance.</p><p>Even at home, Dad couldn’t see me, of course, damn powers, and was understandably distraught. His daughter, his last remaining family, up and vanished one day. And in what circumstances!</p><p>He broke the mirror in his bathroom.</p><p>I wouldn’t normally have gone in there, and just because I’m invisible, I’m not going to start snooping on my own dad, but when I heard the glass break I was worried he’d had an accident.</p><p>I found him sobbing on the floor, knuckles bleeding.</p><p>I haven’t been back since.</p><p>I admit, I’m a coward. Dad didn’t even cry when mom died, at least, not in front of me. Not even at the funeral. I couldn’t bear to watch it, and be unable to do anything to tell him that I’m just invisible now.</p><p>So, I haven’t been back.</p><p>It’s not like I can really do anything at home anyway, and I don’t really need to sleep as much as I used to. Part of my power, I guess. For a few hours a night I sort of drift off, but it’s not like I need a bed or anything. I can choose to sleep more than I need, which I usually do after school. Not much to do when everyone’s gone.</p><p>I don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not home or at school, so I ended up back at school. At least there I can people watch. And listen to the rumor mill, which doesn’t go deadly silent when I get close anymore.</p><p>I feel a vicious satisfaction about the fact that my disappearance seems to have been pinned on Sophia. They arrested her and everything. Praised be whatever shred of karma was owed my way, because they got her at school, and I saw it all, in glorious Technicolor.</p><p>I never know why people say that, Technicolor. The first Technicolor films looked terrible by today’s standards. But that’s what people say.</p><p>She ranted and screamed at the cops, they had to actually cuff her.</p><p>I could have died happy, seeing that.</p><p>Of course, it didn’t last.</p><p>Rumor, which spreads faster than wildfire in schools, and that I was now finally privy to, says she’s out on bail but that they’re charging her with all sorts of things, including murder:</p><p>
  <em>“…uncle says… manslaughter or even just assault by the time …”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“… evidence showing...”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“… Madison cooperating…”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“… witnesses but only…”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“… no sign… body…”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“… probably a plea deal…”</em>
</p><p><em>Blah blah legal mumbo jumbo</em>. I suppose they’ve probably got a somewhat weak case with no body. Like sure, they could ASSUME that somehow Sophia hid the body, but I guess they can’t prove any more than several witnesses – not the least of which is Madison, apparently, the little rat – saw, which is only her pushing me into the locker.</p><p>While I was still home, I saw the cops searching the house, too, and they found my documentation of the bullying. When dad read it, his face went white.</p><p>At least I guess they might get her for assault.</p><p>Anyway, Sophia’s gone, however temporarily, Madison and Emma both are staying away from each other. Everyone else is mostly avoiding the two of them, probably for fear of trouble rubbing off on them, though some people are starting to warm up to Madison again, mostly because she’s spilling all the nitty gritty details of her own interrogation. It just figures that she’d use both having been part of the crime, and having tattled on her co-conspirators, as a leg up the social ladder.</p><p>Emma’s grounded, I think, because she’s never got her phone with her anymore, and straight after school she gets picked up by her frowning mom. The rumor mill’s been throwing the grounded word around, much like you might talk of an unsavory disease. <em>I heard she was… you know… </em><em>grounded</em><em>. </em>Sympathetic gasps usually follow.</p><p>It’s interesting seeing the social order turn itself inside out. The trio used to be the top of the pecking order, at least certainly within our grade, and pretty high up in the rest of the school, too, but now barely anyone talks to them. They’re not bullied, but they’re the next best thing – ignored to their face, but whispered about behind cupped hands, just on the edge of their hearing. In a way, it’s a form of bullying. At least, they certainly used such tactics against me. This time, it’s not manufactured, or intentional, though, and in some ways that makes it worse, I imagine. At least when people were talking about me “behind my back” I knew exactly what they were saying, because they said it loudly and proudly to my face, too.</p>
<hr/><p>Sophia gets back a few days after her arrest. Greatly subdued and sullen, but back. I guess she really did get out on bail.</p><p>All three of them continue staying away from each other in public, but in private – well. Now that I was effectively a ghost, could you blame me for following when Sophia dragged Emma to the bathrooms when she caught her alone?</p><p>I catch the end of a sentence that Sophia is hissing at cowed Emma:</p><p>“-violated probation, and now I get a double whammy for before <em>and</em> this so-called murder bullshit!”</p><p>Emma shakes off Sophia’s hand where it’s gripping her sweater. “Can’t they just get you another deal? Isn’t that the whole point, they need you so they’ll sweep all your baggage under the rug? They did when that bitch tattled to the teachers!”</p><p>I freeze.</p><p>I came here for the schadenfreude of watching Sophia freak out as her life falls apart, maybe watch Emma turn on her like she’d turned on me, but this…</p><p>I’d never expected this.</p><p>I feel like an icy cold hand is squeezing the life out of my heart.</p><p>Sophia sneers. “That was between Blackwell and the Case Bitch. Now it’s gone higher up the ladder, and they’re actually expelling me from the Wards. Me! Expel! Like I ever fucking wanted to be there in the first fucking place!”</p><p>Oh no.</p><p>I feel my legs give way under me and I slide to the floor.</p><p>This… suddenly makes a lot of sense. Sophia, in the Wards. The villains in Brockton Bay outnumber the heroes three to one. Of course they’d let her get away with murder. There’s only two female Wards in town, as far as I know, and Vista is too young and too white to be her, so… yes, “reformed” violent ex-vigilante Shadow Stalker, out on probation… only now she might actually be tried for a murder they can’t cover up.</p><p>I start to giggle helplessly. A murder that didn’t actually happen, because I’m still right here. It’s almost like I faked my own death and set her up. I couldn’t have done it better if I’d planned it myself. Seeing her like this, losing all her special rights, everything she values, being on the wrong end of social ostracization…</p><p>And all it took was my death.</p><p>My laughter turns a little hysterical.</p><p>All it took was a murder that she may as well have committed, for all that I really <em>could</em> have died in there if I hadn’t triggered with the power to be incorporeal and phase through the locker door. A murder that may <em>as well</em> have happened, as far as my dad knew, and as far as my ability to live a normal life was concerned.</p><p>I’m sobbing now.</p><p>I should feel weird about crying in front of those two bitches, but it’s not like they can hear me. And to be honest, if they <em>could</em> hear me, I’d be glad to wail and scream at them.</p><p>I actually contemplate that idea, and while they’re still arguing over whether Sophia is going back to juvie or to prison, I clamber back to my feet, and make my way over to them.</p><p>I let out a <em>scream </em>of all my anger and frustration into Sophia’s face. I try to grab and shake Emma by the shoulders.</p><p>Emma’s face turns white. She’s not looking right at me, she’s looking through me, behind me.</p><p>I turn around to see what could possibly have her attention that’s more important right now.</p><p>Sophia’s eyes are wide and staring at nearly the same spot in the bathroom mirror.</p><p>I look in the mirror, and for the first time since the locker, I can see myself staring back, eyes wide with shock.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I’m going with the common assumption that canon’s claim that Taylor doesn’t know what a parahuman trigger event is for narrative purposes and/or a mistake, and my Taylor does in fact know it.<br/>This is very much a rough draft at the moment, but I’d like input as to whether this idea holds any interest for people, or it’s too cliché to bother with.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you to everyone who read and commented, your advice and/or support is very valuable.<br/>From reading some of the comments, I think I inadvertently led people to believe that Taylor is always and only visible in mirrors. That is not the case, mirrors are neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. She is still working out how that works. I intend to at a later date do some editing on chapter one to avoid that misunderstanding.<br/>I’m trying not to info dump on people, because a lot of us who know things about canon!Worm know a lot of things that Taylor does not, and I don’t want to dwell too much on “revealing” things. Let me know if you think I am striking the balance between realistic for what Taylor knows and boring the crap out of everyone reading.<br/><b>Somewhat spoilery aside</b>, though not anything concrete:<br/>It might be worthwhile to note that we do have a slightly unreliable narrator here both for reasons of ignorance and for other reasons too. I am still learning as a writer so how well I portray that is to be seen.<br/>I’d also like to draw reader’s attention to the “AU” part of the tag. This is an alt!power fic, yes, but it is also an AU. How, will be revealed in the future.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I run away.</p><p>Yes, well, we’ve already established that I’m a coward.</p><p>While a part of me is overjoyed at scaring the shit out of both Emma and Sophia, being my own Ghost of Banquo, the rest of me doesn’t know what to do.</p><p>They could <em>see</em> me. I could see myself! On the one hand, that’s great, I don’t have to spend the rest of my life like a ghost, but they could <em>see me</em>.</p><p>They can continue making my life hell if they can see me. Worse, Sophia will never be tried for my murder, or manslaughter or whatever, if I’m clearly alive.</p><p>I’ve ended up on the roof. I don’t even remember getting here, but I’m here now, and being out in the open allows me to start calming down a little.</p><p>I’ve just had a shock, but everything is still okay. Well, I’ve had several shocks.</p><p>I try to breathe slowly. I don’t think I’m really breathing, what with being incorporeal and all, but it helps to do the motions. Its bloody cold out here, and though the cold doesn’t strictly bother me, I can still feel it, and I remember what it was like to feel a brisk wind blow right through all your layers in the middle of January.</p><p>Mom always used to tell me to wear extra layers. She’d bully Dad into wearing a hat in winter, even when he was “<em>only going to be walking to and from the car, Annette</em>.” Given his thinning hair, probably a good idea.</p><p>The attempt at calming down still leaves me angry about Sophia.</p><p>It’s all making a sick kind of sense, why she always seemed so untouchable, why the administration didn’t want to hear anything bad about her. Why she saunters with such cocky confidence in a school filled with its fair share of Empire members, why she isn’t afraid to walk around alone.</p><p>I almost wish I was still in the bathroom, so that <em>I</em> could punch a mirror or two, but up here there’s nothing for me to vent my frustration on, really.</p><p>I let loose another scream, though. Why not? It’s not like anybody can hear me.</p><p>A bird takes off from a few yards away from me, and it startles me.</p><p>Did I scare it? Could it hear me? Was it just a coincidence that it took off right then?</p><p>Something else starts to niggle at me. Sure, I could continue to hide my survival from the cops, and let Sophia do her day in court. I doubt anyone would believe her or Emma seeing me in the bathroom, it’s such an obvious guilty conscience thing.</p><p>But then again, since there was no body, what if they go to the PRT, especially if Sophia has contacts, and they actually get someone to take them seriously? Capes with a Stranger rating that can be invisible or close to it aren’t unheard of. What if the authorities realizes I’m not dead, and worse yet start to think I purposefully faked my own death to set up Sophia?</p><p>Using parahuman powers for personal gain against ordinary citizens, (even if they later turned out to be a vigilante-turned-Ward) was the sort of thing that could well end with me in prison, or even Bird Caged. Ordinarily, Sophia’s own treatment by the authorities might make me think they’d go easy on me and just force me into the Wards. Even that idea, being in a team that was friendly with Sophia, even if she stayed expelled after my not-murder came to light, was unpleasant. But given that my “crime” would be of having set up a Ward, an actual agent of the state, they’d probably not be anywhere near as lenient. It’s like how crimes against cops were prosecuted much more aggressively, and punished much more heavily, than crimes against ordinary citizens, even crimes by those same-said cops. Given that they might not be able to contain me properly, even in the Bird-cage, being largely incorporeal, they might just decide I was too dangerous and too uncontainable to allow to live.</p><p>I start shaking.</p><p>What are they going to tell Dad? Is it not enough that they told him his daughter vanished and was almost definitely dead? Now they have to tell him his child is an enemy of the state, and faked her own death, <em>lied to him</em>, made him believe she was dead, too?</p><p>The shaking is out of control, I can actually feel the cold wind that’s rattling the windows below me.</p><p>I’m not sure when I’ve walked over to the edge of the roof.</p><p>Could the PRT even do anything to me? If I can sometimes be corporeal, if that was indeed what happened when I could see myself in the mirror, corporeal enough for light to interact with me, then can I be corporeal enough for them to… well kill me? Purity, from the Empire, can shoot some sort of laser beams, as can most of New Wave, now that I think about it, and those guys are much more likely to cooperate with the PRT. Could they murder me with light beams? What if they-</p><p>I hear the school bell ring in the building below me.</p><p>The noise jolts me back to a semblance of normality.</p><p>It’s just such an ingrained noise in my life, that I immediately feel the need to jump to do whatever I’m supposed to be doing next.</p><p><em>Shit</em>, I suddenly think, I’m the biggest idiot. I try to shake myself off. Why did I leave Sophia and Emma to their own devices, when I should have stayed to spy on them, to see what they do? Even if they can see me in mirrors, I could have followed at a distance.</p><p>I did, after all, get up here to the roof without having anyone make a scene. Surely if someone saw me, they’d have been weirded out by seeing the supposedly dead or missing girl. Especially the translucent, bloodless ghoul I’d seen reflected back at me – though that well could just have been the awful lighting in the girl’s bathrooms at Winslow.</p><p>Now that I’m trying to think rationally, I realise it’s not the end of the world yet. Now that I know I can at least sometimes been seen, I can communicate with the rest of the world. I could be a spy for the heroes after all. Assuming I can convince them I wasn’t trying to fake my own murder.</p><p>Of course, now that I also know that Sophia Hess is in the Wards, I still don’t exactly want to work with them. Not that I would ever have been keen to join another group filled with judgemental teenagers, but when I already know for a fact who they’ve been friends with? Not a chance.</p><p>Could I operate alone? I dubiously look down and my once again invisible body, and where it’s not even leaving footprints in the snow on the rooftop. What could I even do against a villainous cape? What could I even do against an ordinary human criminal? Spook them a little if they happen to glance in a mirror?</p><p>Maybe I could collaborate with New Wave. They mostly operate as a family unit, from what I hear, but surely they wouldn’t be opposed to at least the occasional useful tip about a villain?</p><p>I’m being stupid. I can’t start planning what to do until I know more concretely what my powers can do. So far, since the locker, I’ve been moping because I thought I had zero effect on the rest of the world, but now I know that that’s clearly not true, at least not all of the time. Even if I manage nothing more than visibility, if I can learn sign language, I could communicate with people like that. At the very least, I need to find out what I can do. The most important thing right now is to get more information about my powers and how they work.</p><p>Hope begins to lift my spirits. Maybe it’s not the end of the world.</p><p>I head back down into the school proper by letting myself float back down through the roof.</p>
<hr/><p>I decide that first of all I need to conclusively determine if people can generally see me now.</p><p>Walking in front of the janitor and waving my hand repeatedly in front of her face disproves that pretty firmly.</p><p>Class started a little while ago, so there’s not many other people around, but I do see a boy heading into the bathroom. I don’t feel comfortable following him in there, and besides, I’ve heard the boy’s bathrooms don’t have mirrors at Winslow anyways. Even the ones in the girl’s are just sheets of polished metal, which makes it hard to see clearly in them because they’re scratched all over with profanity.</p><p>It takes another half an hour before I see a girl headed into the bathroom. I beat her there by phasing through the wall, and madly wave my arms while standing at the sink, both when she first enters, and when she walks over to wash her hands.</p><p>No reaction from her whatsoever, and I can’t see myself either.</p><p>My enthusiasm flags. It would have been too easy, I suppose.</p><p>Besides, it wouldn’t have been that great if I was always visible in reflective surfaces, especially if people became aware of that limitation. Want to check for spies? Just wave a hand-held mirror around!</p><p>What made me temporarily visible? It wasn’t just Emma and Sophia freaking out, which, let’s face it, could have been from them seeing a spider. Well, maybe not Sophia, she doesn’t seem the type to scream at the sight of a creepy crawly.</p><p>But it wasn’t just them, I saw <em>myself</em> for a moment there. I can see myself if I look down at my body, but it’s transparent and sort of blurry in places. If I look in a mirror I don’t see anything at all.</p><p>Okay, I have to think. What was going on at the time that they saw me? Mirror, bathroom – check. Is it because Emma and Sophia know me, or I know them? Is having some relationship the key? But no, I’ve been hanging around spying on them for over a week, and they’d never seen me before. Dad hadn’t seen me, back when I made the mistake of trying to go home.</p><p>I suppose it could have been a weird interaction with Sophia’s own powers. From what little I know, Shadow Stalker can turn into shadows or something, something I am fairly certain I didn’t see her doing at the time, even if she was doing it subconsciously due to being upset.</p><p>My frustration grows. How can I recreate circumstances I can’t even identify?</p>
<hr/><p>I spend the rest of the day haunting the bathroom on the off chance someone else manages to see me. I see a few people I know personally, who might conceivably have a connection to me, like Madison, but nothing changes: no one can see me.</p>
<hr/><p>When the school day ends, I decide to follow Sophia. So far, she and Emma are my only leads, and since Sophia is the one with the PRT connection, if they’re going to tattle to the authorities about me, it makes more sense for it to be her who talks to someone about it, so this serves the dual purpose of keeping an eye on what they’re going to say about it, if anything. It does mean I potentially miss out on what Emma might say to her lawyer dad, but to be honest, the idea of following Emma home, to the place that used to be <em>my</em> second home, watching her family, people who used to be my second family… yeah, no.</p><p>She might have called someone on the phone before I got to her, of course, but there’s nothing I can do about that possibility.</p><p>I follow her downtown, straight to the PRT headquarters.</p><p>No one acknowledges or stops me following her into the building, into the elevator, or even into the Ward HQ itself.</p><p>A wavy haired blonde girl looks up from where she’s reading on the couch when Sophia walks in, but quickly looks back down after a mumbled greeting.</p><p>Sophia grunts and heads into a room off the main area. I follow her but quickly retreat after she starts changing.</p><p>I find myself back in the main area, where the blonde girl is sneaking periodic glances at the door Sophia disappeared behind.  After a few minutes, Sophia walks back out, full decked out in Shadow Stalker’s costume.</p><p>It’s something, seeing it up close, in reality, and also knowing for sure that my guess as to her cape identity was correct.</p><p>The girl on the couch startles. I suddenly realise that she must be one of the Wards, unless other kids make a habit of hanging around her, but I doubt it since Sophia has openly changed from civilian to cape identity in front of her. Process of elimination, this girl must be Vista.</p><p>Shit, now I’ve seen a cape out of costume. I could get in trouble for this. It wasn’t on purpose, of course, but I did knowingly follow Sophia into the Wards HQ, and seeing or hearing something confidential in here was very likely.</p><p>I try not to look too closely at Vista’s face.</p><p>“You’re suspended from patrolling!” Vista exclaims.</p><p>“What are you going to do about it, short stuff?” Sophia retorts. “Tell Piggy if you want, I don’t give a fuck.”</p><p> She makes her way back out before Vista even has a chance to reach for her phone.</p><p>I follow, but hear Vista speaking urgently into her phone before we leave.</p><p>Being the middle of winter, there’s only about half an hour til the sun sets, and since it’s also a cloudy day, it’s already starting to get dark outside by now.</p><p>Shadow Stalker typically uses a bow and tranquilizer darts on bad guys, according to PHO, but I notice she doesn’t have anything like that with her. She took her school back with her, though, and it looks out of place against the darkness of her costume, but it’s a generic backpack, and I suppose it won’t out her civilian identity to be carrying it.</p><p>Once she’s out of sight of the PRT building, she glances around her, and then takes a running leap at the wall of a building. Mid-jump, her already dark-costumed form turns to black shadow and her jump takes her a lot further than it would have an ordinary human, all the way up to the roof of the two storey building.</p><p>Now, I usually walk, because that’s what I’m used to, but I can phase through walls and floors, and can even float if I make an effort, so it’s easy enough for me to focus to lift myself up and follow her.</p><p>By the time I get up to the roof, Sophia is already taking another shadow leap at the next building, and I speed up to keep up with her.</p><p>I’m thankful for the fact that my body is only somewhat there, because I have no doubt that if I tried to run for that long and at a speed fast enough to follow a track athlete with super powers before I got my own powers, I would have been gasping on the floor long before we reached our destination.</p><p>After about 15 minutes, she drops back down onto the ground, utilising her shadow state for most of the jump again. I follow her down and find myself in an alley.</p><p>Ahead of me, she pushes a dumpster away from the brick wall of the building and then wriggles one of the bricks out from the wall I order to pull something long and thin but curved out of the hiding spot.</p><p>It’s the bow she uses, I realise. I start to wonder why she had it hidden here, where anyone could steal or destroy it, rather than in the Ward’s headquarters with her costume, or even at home. Then again, if she really is suspended like Vista said, maybe they tried to confiscate her weapon. Or maybe they <em>did</em> confiscate it, and this is a spare.</p><p>After replacing the loose brick and dumpster how she found them, minus the bow and a narrow quiver of arrows she’d strapped to her back, Sophia made her way back to the rooftops and we resumed our journey, this time headed southwest.</p><p>It wasn’t long until we came across some thugs wandering around down below, and Sophia slowed down to observe them, dropping her bag down next to the air conditioning unit on the roof.</p><p>There was only four of them and three of them were wearing black leather jackets. They all had varying shades of blonde hair, from peroxide white to a dirty almost-brown that only very charitably fell in the same category, and at least two of them had visible tattoos, one of which was a somewhat stylized (for plausible deniability?) swastika on her palm. I suppose it was less visible than if it had been on the back of her hand, at least.</p><p>I had no doubt these people were Empire members, and Sophia probably felt the same, judging by the fact that she was drawing her bow.</p><p>I was a little alarmed by that, to be honestly. Sure, they were clearly members of a Nazi gang, and I’d heard rumours that to even join you need to assault a person of colour or other minority they despise, but did that give superheroes the right to just shoot them at will? Though, I suppose Shadow stalker used tranquilizer darts, and there were four of them versus one high school girl, so perhaps she wanted to knock them out before they could react, so they wouldn’t overwhelm her, and then sort out if they needed to be arrested for anything.</p><p>Still, it seemed weird. They weren’t even doing anything, just having a smoke and chatting.</p><p>Sophia pulled the arrow back and let it fly.</p><p>The guy it hit let out a scream. The arrow hit him in the leg, and a moment later his blue jeans started darkening with what had to be blood.</p><p>I felt my eyes widen. Those weren’t tranquilizer darts. I looked back to Sophia, where she was drawing another arrow, and from what little my untrained eye could tell, those looked like ordinary, sharp, metal tipped arrows.</p><p>Her second arrow missed her target, and the thugs were already looking up and pointing at where her form was no doubt just visible against the darkening sky.</p><p>She took a few more shots, but only just hit one in the shoulder before dumping her bow on the roof and jumping all the way down to the ground. Clearing without the bow, she must have seemed less threatening to them, because the uninjured guy and girl rushed her, the girl wielding a knife.</p><p>Sophia swung a punch, using the same shadow-and-back-again trick to punch as she had to jump further and for longer. If she could jump two stories from that, I wondered how much harder she could hit like that, wincing as the knife-wielding girl went flying back from the punch and crumpled against the wall that only minutes ago she’d been leaning against to smoke, near the two arrow-wounded guys.</p><p>The guy was just behind the girl, clearly slower due to his heavier bulk, but Sophia didn’t even bother ducking the blow he’d aimed at her head, merely turning to shadow form while his fist passed through her, and continued to move forward until she was all the way through him, at which point she turned normal again and kicked him in the back of the knee. He lost balance and toppled forward.</p><p>I stared in disbelief at the scene. It had been only seconds since Sophia had let fly her first shot, and two of her opponents were on the ground, while the other two were dealing with the arrows sticking out from their leg and shoulder, respectively. All four were injured or at least temporarily disabled. All four looked to be at least in their twenties, probably more like thirties in the woman’s and the leg-arrow man’s case. Sophia was fifteen or maybe sixteen, and she’d just handed their asses to them. Admittedly, she’d had the advantage of surprise, and sure, super powers, but if I had her same advantages, I doubted I could have done anywhere near as well. She was a very skilled fighter, and very good at utilizing her power to give herself every advantage. I wonder if all the Wards were trained like that. I felt a pang at the fact that I could almost certainly not receive the same training from them, given my disinclination to join them.</p><p>Curiosity now thoroughly piqued as to what an average day in the life of a Ward entailed, watched what she would do next. Would she call for cops to come pick them up? Skill or no, I doubted she could force four restrained adults to the police station alone. Surely, she’d have to call for backup, since tying them up and coming back later for them one at a time surely ran the risk of the ones she left behind escaping or calling for help while she was gone.</p><p>She didn’t try either of those things, though. Instead, her body language reeking of disgust, she spat on the man whose knee she’d kicked, walked over to the man still wrestling with the arrow in his shoulder and <em>ripped it out!</em></p><p>I stared in shock. The man screamed, because of course he did, who wouldn’t? Arrows do a fair amount of damage going in, but the tapered end means that yanking them back the way they came would be even more painful. In fact I’d read somewhere that sometimes in war people used to just cut the shaft of the arrow off and push the arrowhead all the way through to the other side to do less damage for some wounds. I could only imagine how much Sophia’s yank had hurt the man. Nazi or no, I truly felt bad for him right then.</p><p>She spun to face the leg-wound guy, and was probably going to do the same thing to his arrow, but that guy hadn’t been sleeping while this was going on, and had drawn a gun, left arm braced against the garbage bin next to him, since his blood-soaked leg clearly wasn’t up to holding him up that well.</p><p>He fired but Sophia had already gone shadow, and the bullet harmlessly passed through her.</p><p>Still shadow, she made a swipe for his leg again, and went back to normal to grab the arrow and a split second later was back to shadow again, arrow gone from his leg.</p><p>She was using a lot of effort to get her arrows back, even putting herself in mortal danger by going back to normal form after realising one of them had a gun, I thought. Either she was really low on arrows, or there was another reason she didn’t want to leave them lying around.</p><p>While I was lamenting her attachment to her ammunition, Sophia leapt back up onto the roof she’d left her stuff on, and yelled back down at the Nazis below: “No wonder you fucks have so many capes if your normies are such losers! I’ve had better fights from drugged up Merchants!”</p><p>She spat back down at them, symbolically, I suppose, since they were a fair distance away from this side of the street, and even Shadow-form spit probably wouldn’t reach them, I thought, a little nonsensically.</p><p>Clearly frustrated, she grabbed her bow and the backpack over by the air conditioner, in advertently coming near me in the process. I could hear her breathing loudly, but it didn’t seem like it was from physical excretion. Probably more likely to be annoyance. I supposed this wasn’t the fight she’d been looking form.</p><p>“Fuck!” she quietly spat out to herself, and slammed her hand against the air conditioning unit, letting out a loud clang which startled both of us.</p><p>She rooted around in her backpack and pulled out a phone. I carefully floated over to see if there was anything interesting I could spy on. Carefully because I still didn’t know when or how I might become visible and I certainly didn’t want to be tangible while Shadow Stalker was next to me, fully armed with live arrows. Let’s not tempt fate by having her actually murder me.</p><p>She was reading a text message from “Mom”, asking her where she was.</p><p>Sophia swore again and put the phone away after typing out a quick reply I didn’t catch. She pulled the backpack over her shoulder and headed to what I thought was the north.</p><p>I didn’t know where she was going for sure, but contextually, given I was fairly certain she had to live in that direction, since she went to the same school as me, and that was roughly where I lived, she was probably heading home. Normally I wouldn’t expect Sophia to be quick to reply to any authority figured, even her parents, but if she was already on a short leash due to the murder charges…</p><p>Odds are, she was heading home. Or if she did do anything else before she went home, it was probably going to be more of the same. Meanwhile, here I had four injured Empire stooges in front of me, and nothing else to occupy my time with.</p><p>Most of the villains in Brockton Bay wouldn’t go to the hospitals if injured for obvious reasons, but presumably had access to shady doctors via under-table favours.</p><p>The Empire, however, was unique in that they had their own parahuman healer, Othalla. She wasn’t anywhere near as good as New Wave’s Panacea, but she was still plenty better than a hospital, especially for such minor wounds as these.</p><p>If I followed these losers as they retreated to lick their wounds, there was a small possibility that they might lead me back to Othalla. Of course, given the hundred of members of the gang, and these guys’ likely low importance, whether the capes would deign wasting Othalla’s time on such a minor thing was debatable, but at the very least I could follow them back to some sort of base, or, even if it was just their own personal houses, I would have somewhere to start next time for surveillance purposes, since so far, surveillance seemed to be my biggest advantage.</p><p>To be perfectly honest, too, Sophia’s brutality, against someone other than me, had kind of shocked me, and I didn’t really want to spend any more time watching more of the same. It said something, I think, that I felt more comfortable following Nazi villains instead.</p><p>Decision made, I allowed Sophia to disappear from my view across the rooftops and instead floated my way down to follow the thugs.</p><p>Time to haunt the crap out of some Nazis!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I’m not sure if Manton limitation mean that Sophia couldn’t shadow form the arrow that was already in the guy and phasing it back out with her, and if anyone knows, please let me know. If that would have indeed limited her, then I’ll just change it to her going normal form for a second, yanking the arrow out again before the guy can shoot her again and then shadowing with it again once it’s out the ordinary (and much more painful) way.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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